Dear Friends,
“I baptize you
with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after
me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy
Spirit and fire.” Matthew 3:11
These
words from John the Baptist allude to the one who is coming after him, who will
do things “more powerful” than anything has done or is doing. There is this notion in scripture that fire
is bad—it’s the equivalent of the eternal hell.
It’s often described as “eternal fire”.
It doesn’t sound all that appealing, yet it is language used by Jesus to
describe the alternative to following him.
As a pastor, I don’t always know how to talk about this. What good does it do the kingdom of God to
describe hell to people? I usually see
it as fear-mongering, manipulative theology, or coercion into accepting
Christ. I don’t think Jesus was about
this kind of message. But I also have to
remember that Jesus had a variety of audiences.
His illustrations always seemed to best communicate with those who were
listening. “Know your audience”—this was
taught to me by all of my writing and speech teachers as far back as I can
remember. Jesus knew his audience. So Jesus also would have known when to speak
love, when to speak acceptance, when to speak power. Speaking hell was speaking power, and it had
the effect of adding credibility and authority to his message.
But
back to the fire: this second Sunday in
June is Pentecost. It’s often thought of
as the birth of the church in the world—the giving of the Holy Spirit to those
who would gather that day from all over the near ends of the earth. And something amazing happened in that
“place”. Those tongues alighted on
them—tongues as of fire. And this reads
as though it was a description of what the Holy Spirit appeared to be—not that
it was an actual fire on them, but the appearance of this Spirit that arrived
with a rushing, violent wind, and then rested on them in “divided
tongues”. So, the image of fire is used
to help describe this appearance.
BUT,
then we see these words from John the Baptist, where he refers to the way that
Jesus will baptize his followers—with the Holy Spirit and with FIRE! This is a mysterious Spirit—the Holy
One. It is active. It is anointing. It is fleeting, violently windy, and at the
same time, powerful. It is God
moving. It is Jesus at work. It is so much deeper, and yet elusive, than
the simple description of its appearance.
Pentecost
is a time to remember, to celebrate, to pay witness to how this same Spirit, the
SAME one, is at work in our own lives today.
Does it appear as a violent rush of wind? Does is alight on us as a divided tongue as
of fire? (Floridians may be quick to
answer this in June) I have not seen the
movement of God in this particular way, but I have no doubt that the Spirit is
active and at work.
There
have been more than a few questions about how we are doing in our interim
process at First Presbyterian. I think
the answers lie in how well we are paying attention the work of the Holy Spirit. What kind of stories are you hearing
about? How has this history of this
ministry impacted your life? Where is
God calling us, calling you, to be at work in the future? Have we been baptized with fire and the Holy
Spirit? Well?
Peace, Love, Hope
and Joy, Tim
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